


La Belle Dame Sans Merci

by ninhursag



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tales, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-26
Updated: 2010-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-06 17:42:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninhursag/pseuds/ninhursag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone in Boston is killing young men and it's disturbing Reid's dreams. Part one is from Reid's pov and part two is from JJ's</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks are due to the fine people who encouraged me like [](http://rei-c.livejournal.com/profile)[**rei_c**](http://rei-c.livejournal.com/), [](http://sloane-m.livejournal.com/profile)[**sloane_m**](http://sloane-m.livejournal.com/) and [](http://buffyaddict13.livejournal.com/profile)[**buffyaddict13**](http://buffyaddict13.livejournal.com/). Oh, and [](http://cormallen.livejournal.com/profile)[**cormallen**](http://cormallen.livejournal.com/) who gave me much needed advice on this fic despite not really watching the show.

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |  [criminal minds](http://vaingirlfic.livejournal.com/tag/criminal+minds)  
---|---  
  
"Yesterday upon the stair   
I met a man who wasn't there.   
He wasn't there again today.   
I wish that man would go away."  
Hughes Mearns (1875-1965)

I saw pale kings and princes too,  
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;  
They cried - "La Belle Dame sans Merci  
Hath thee in thrall!"  
\--Keats

\  
He wakes up with light in his eyes. Bright, hazy silver from the full moon shining in. He whimpers and squeezes them closed like he can make the itch of his eyelids stop. It's useless.

When he opens his eyes wider, wider, all he can see is silver. Long fine strands of it, like hair, swinging, swinging in the moonlight. There's a voice, a woman's voice, low and thin. She's laughing.

It sounds like bells. He can smell flowers and hear bells. "Can I have your soul?" she asks him, through that bright, bright laughter.

"W-what?" he stutters, stutters and tries to move, to sit up, but he can't. He can't. His eyes blink and blink and blink again. So dry. His hands and feet don't even twitch.

She bends down low, so he can feel her breath on his throat. "Soul is form and makes the body. Can I have yours?"

He can't shake his head. His head won't move. His neck won't move. He screams once, short, sharp and cut off.

It's winter. Everything is dead and the snow's piled on the ground in dirty, salty mounds. It's winter, but all he can smell is flowers.

\

A thousand miles south, Spencer Reid wakes up fighting about ten seconds before his alarm is due to blare. His hands get tangled in the sheets, but he manages to get one free and scrambles for the off button with just two seconds to go before it goes off.

Then he huddles back down under the covers for another ten seconds, watching the big, bright numbers on the clock as they shift. The dream he had is sitting loosely just under the surface of his mind, stirring things up.

If anyone were around to ask him, he'd tell them he doesn't remember what he dreamed about, but there's no one, just the soft expanse of cotton sheets and the red numbers on the clock. He'd tell them he doesn't remember. That his arms don't itch.

Reid remembers _everything_, especially the things he's not supposed to. It doesn't matter, of course. He's used to it. He finishes staring down the alarm after another minute or so and goes to work that morning in a long sleeved shirt.

JJ catches him on the way in and smiles and waves. Her hair's bright in the pale winter sun and she looks loose and easy. She doesn't smile like that at him much any more.

"Heya, Spence," she calls. Her voice is light, like for this morning she's forgotten that Reid's... whatever he is. "Catch you in the briefing room as soon as you're settled in."

Reid's mouth slips into an answering smile, easy and automatic. If she can pretend, he can. He can even want to. "We got a case?"

"Oh yeah," JJ says. "The Boston and Cambridge police have never seen anything like it. Wait until you see it." She's shaking her head, but she's still relaxed so Reid figures it doesn't involve kids or rapists. He nods along. Pretending seems to get easier every year. Every month.

It turns out to be men. Gideon tacks their pictures on the wall. There are three, in rapid succession. "All in their twenties, college students. Jeffery Dack was doing graduate work in Elizabethan poetry at Harvard. Alex Finnegan was a guitar major at Berklee. And the most recent is Carl Dunstond, bioengineering at MIT."

Reid leans in, frowning. There's something in the pictures, blurring them. Like there were dust motes on the camera or... "Is that glitter?" he asks. "Around the bodies, the mouth... is that-- are they covered in glitter?" He can't imagine the crime scene cameras would pull that kind of an effect unless there was something there.

Gideon raises an eyebrow at him. "Good call, but not exactly. Forensic analysis says it's powdered silver."

Reids absently pops his pen cap into his mouth, while Morgan gives a low whistle from across the table. "Silver? That's kind of a pricey signature."

Gideon nods. "It's not just a signature, it's the murder weapon. All three victims were found asphyxiated in their own beds, having literally choked to death on silver dust. The corner only explanation is that it was funneled into their throats."

"Holy... fuck," Morgan mutters. "Why... how would someone get a hold of that much powdered silver? Is that? Powdered silver?"

"You can buy it," Reid says, he frowns and slides the pen back out of his mouth, staring at the yellow paper in front of him. "On the internet. Wherever."

"Any signs of a sexual assault?" Morgan cuts back in.

Gideon gives a narrow head shake. "It's inconclusive," he says. "Two of the victims, Dunstond and Finnegan, had sex shortly before their deaths. Certainly the act of killing in this manner, filling up the victim's mouth, is strongly indicative of a sexual component to the murders."

"Did they hold still for this? I mean, if someone tries to pour a shit ton of silver down my throat, I struggle, right?" Morgan says.

"They were drugged. All of them," JJ says from the sidelines. "Ketamine." They all shudder, Reid can see them. He doesn't move himself. He doesn't think about being drugged.

Reid looks up again because he's thinking about something else. "The third one, Dunstond, did he have anything to do with art... I mean, music, literature, art, that kind of thing? I mean, it wasn't his major, but--"

Gideon shrugs, but his gaze is steady, too steady and fixed on Reid. "Art? That's an interesting question. The first two victims were both focused in the arts. You think there might be a pattern?"

Reid frowns and narrows his eyes at the pictures of the dead men, silver sprinkled all around them. "I had the weirdest dream," he says, so soft it's almost to himself. Stops, shakes his head. "Honestly, I don't know yet. Let's get to Boston and find out."

If the rest of the team looks at him funny on the way to the jet, they don't say anything, just kind of skirt around the edges. Reid remembers exactly, down to the second, when it was that they stopped saying things to him. He's pretty sure it's just that they're waiting for him to open his mouth and talk first, but pretty sure isn't... It's not enough, not yet.

He's still got things to figure out.

\

On the jet over to Boston, Reid dreams. It's not surprising. Enough disturbed sleep and it's easy to be tired, to fall asleep anywhere. Let everything go.

He's been here before, once in the flesh and a thousand times in dreams. There's the stink in his nostrils, fish guts and wet earth. Blood, his own. Shovel shaking in his hands. He's going to die. He can feel his body quake with the knowledge, the thick adrenaline pushing past the drugs, the pain.

He sees Tobias Hankel and the gun, smells death. Weird things flash to mind. Some show he saw on the History Channel, a holocaust survivor who talked about the Nazis making their victims dig their own graves. The images, black and white on a grainy old television flicker in front of him like it's on now, like the story on tv is his. Reid smells dirt, graveyard earth.

Tobias is in front of him, gun in hand, just like it happened. Someone else is behind him.

"I can see you," she says. Her voice is cool, soft. She's laughing. "Why would you want to hide here?" she asks, "When you can be with me?"

Reid turns around and the world melts behind him. No more Tobias, no more gun, just the lingering smell of blood and earth.

Her eyes are silver, luminous and pale, and she's smiling. No one's eyes are that color, not without contacts and mood lighting. He scrambles for statistics on eye color, but the numbers slip away before he can grasp them. "Who are you?" Reid whispers. His voice quakes, breaks on the words.

"Three guesses," she says. She holds up three slender fingers one by one.

"I'm losing my mind," Reid says. The shaking stops, like saying it is enough to calm him down. The words feel steady, factual. "This is a psychotic break and you aren't real."

She laughs, bright as bells, and lowers one finger. "You're just dreaming, Spencer. But that's one guess down. I'll give you a hint. My name's Leanne and you're coming to see me."

Then she kisses him. Hard and wet and on the mouth. Her teeth are sharp, like razors when she kisses. There's blood on his mouth, hot and thin, rivulets over his lips that he can taste when he licks.

He wakes up with Gideon staring down at him with the quietest eyes. "It'll get better," Gideon tells him, "The dreams will ease off, even if it doesn't feel like that yet."

Reid nods as though that's true. "Prognosis for post-traumatic stress is variable," he says, as though there were a question and he was just answering it. "In many cases the subject recovers within six months. Only 30% of individuals will be effected over the long term or permanently."

Gideon shakes his head and smiles, weird and fond, like Reid's his kid and just gave him a fingerpainting. Reid pretends that's not really annoying, mostly by ignoring it. He doesn't rattle off the list of possible complications relating to post traumatic stress, like major depression and substance abuse.

His arms itch and he tugs his sweater sleeves down further, until they brush his fingertips. JJ's in the seat next to him, watching him, but when he looks at her straight on her gaze slides away.

\  
The Cambridge police precinct they set up in is housed in a small brick and concrete building, square, squat and modern looking next to the row houses around it. The modernity is only in comparison, the place must have been built in the 50's and the heating vents make low, knocking sounds.

JJ helps the local liaison officer set up their equipment in a corner. The cop is a young woman, white faced in her blue uniform.

She has her hand pressed over her mouth, like she's trying to block something out, but she talks to JJ free and easy "It's not human," she says, loud, strident. "I mean, what's the point of doing something like this? A monster did this."

JJ has on her patient, kind smile. Reid can recognize it exactly from the angle of her lips and the crinkling around her eyes. "Believe me, there are enough human monsters out there. I think it would be easier if it were something else."

Then Reid sees the pictures spread over the table and he stops paying attention to anything else. There's a body, another man, young and white. Irish pale with black, black hair.

A normal person would focus right on the face, but that's not what Reid sees first. There's something spelled out in thin black ink over the man's bare stomach. Words written in a shaky hand, emotion brushed out in ink. An invocation, Reid thinks and then doesn't know why.

_The other day upon the stair, there was a girl who wasn't there. She wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish she'd go away._

"Hugh Mearns. Doggerel poetry, but popular," Reid mutters under his breath. He can hear his mother's tone behind the words. Sharp, dismissive. "Why?"

JJ shakes her head, hovers just out of touching range. Warm behind Reid's shoulder. She stands close to Reid, even when it's the liaison she's facing, talking to. It's just that she never touches him, not anymore. It's like she can smell the wrong in him.

"Have you found any connection between the victims?" she asks.

"Not much to go on. They were all at different schools, mostly ran with different sets of friends." The officer shrugs. "The only thing we found out is that they all spent Tuesday nights at a bar in Central Square called the Cantab. Poetry nights."

"You staked the place out, of course," Reid says, still looking at the picture, and glancing at JJ, not the officer. JJ isn't looking back at him.

"We still have it staked out," the officer says, mouth tightening. "We're not stupid. But we haven't gotten anything. They knew each other, but it doesn't lead anywhere."

Reid sighs and looks steadily at her forehead instead of her eyes. "Our unsub is meticulous in the set-up, the scenes. He or she is following a pattern. It's unlikely in the extreme that this connection between the victims isn't relevant."

"We know that," the officer says, sharp, bitten off. He doesn't know if he's supposed to feel her anger, if she wants him to get upset by it. His own responses are out of whack, exhausting, even to him.

Instead of trying to figure out what the 'normal' thing to do might be, Reid shrugs and looks back at the evidence. It doesn't occur to him until later that he never even gets the woman's name.

"I want to go and take a look," he tells JJ. She looks at him and he wonders for the first time how well she's been sleeping. There are bags under her eyes, under a layer of smeared concealer. She smiles for him anyway. He expects her to nod, say something about clearing it with Gideon and Hotch and let him go.

She nods. "Let me get set up here and clear it with Gideon and Hotch," she says, right on target. She rubs her eyes, like she can rub her exhaustion away. Look at him a little harder. "I'll come with you," she adds after a pause.

"Yeah, okay." He smiles back before he knows he's doing it.   
\

The Cantab turns out to be a typical bar, narrow and dark paneled. There's a stage for live music tucked into one corner, but not much room to dance if anyone wanted to.

At around one in the afternoon no one is dancing. There are a couple of college kids and a man and a woman, both in business suits, in the booths eating lunch, but that's it. Reid stalks from one end of the bar to the other while JJ talks to the owner in the back room.

Reid sees the bartender before she turns to look at him. Her hair is ice blonde, paler than JJ's honey color, close to white, but her face is young. Smooth, calm. He can almost taste her perfume. Flowers, heavy, thick, like an old woman's scent, not a girl's. She's got her hands on a whiskey bottle, pouring a shot.

She smiles at him when she turns to see him there. Sets the bottle down on the bar. "You're another policeman," she says, before he gets the chance to. "Let me guess, you have more questions for me."

"Yeah," he says. He has a yellow notepad tucked into the pocket of his shirt, but he doesn't pull it out. It's not like he'll forget anything she says to him. Reid's problem has never been forgetting. "What's your name?" he asks. He didn't ask that police officer her name back at the precinct her name and he can't forget that either.

"Leanne," the bartender says. She tilts her chin so that her hair spills away from her eyes. In the dim light they're a dull, silvery gray. "Are you going to find out who did this, Mr. Policeman?"

"I'm an FBI agent," Reid says, like that's relevant. Like his brain isn't screaming at him. Leanne. Leanne. She doesn't look like the woman he dreamed about, not really. She's duller, grayer. Human in the bad light of the room.

"Whoever you are, I want you to find them," Leanne says. Her face goes still, unsmiling. "Swear you will."

"I--" Reid begins, but someone calls from behind him.

"Reid! Reid." It's JJ. There's something in her voice, urgent, tight that makes him want to jump. Want to fix whatever's upsetting her. He spins around to look at her. "Are you talking to someone?"

Reid frowns. The expression on her face. She looks twisted up, like she wants to say something else and that makes him blink. She looks as scared as she sounds and he doesn't know why. He shakes his head. "Yeah, I was just--"

When he turns back around to look at Leanne, there's no one there. The stool behind the bar is empty and all the bottles are neatly stocked away. Reid doesn't know what's in his face when he looks back at JJ, but she doesn't come any closer.

She takes a breath, audible even over the background music. He watches her steady herself, so fast that someone who didn't know her might never have noticed she was upset. "Okay," she mutters, the word more a motion of her lips than a sound.

There's a woman next to her. Older, crow's feet and brightly dyed red hair. JJ looks at her and then back at Reid. "This is Carol," she says. "She owns the place.

"Hi, Carol. I need to talk to your bartender," Reid says. He can feel his fingers twitching, smell sweat, and he doesn't want to think about what he looks like, what he must look like. He doesn't want to think about the fact that what's freaking JJ out is probably him.

Carol blinks, like she's got no idea what he's talking about. "Leanne," Reid pushes.

Carol bites her lip. "Someone told you Leanne was a bartender?" she asks and shakes her head.

Reid's stomach wrenches but he tries to keep it off his expression. "She's not?"

Carol's face twists into incredulity and she laughs, painfully nervous. Embarrassed, like Reid's just been the victim of a practical joke and she has to tell him. "I can't believe anyone said that to you. To a Fed! Jesus. She's not-- look, there is no Leanne working here. That's just what they used to call their slam poetry team, it's a play on Lan-awn."

Reid's hands go still while his brain pulls out the missing piece of the puzzle. "Lan-awn, you mean Lennan. Lennan sidhe. A fairy muse. Commonly believed to be vampiric in nature, as written about by Yeats. By 'they', you mean--"

"I mean the guys who-- the ones who were murdered," she looks away. "It was kind of a new thing, the team. They wrote together. Entered some competitions. They called themselves the Disciples of Leanne, it was... they thought they were being clever, I guess. I didn't even-- fuck, I should have told the cops this before, shouldn't I have?"

"Was anyone else on the team with them?" Reid presses, leaning in after her. "Or associated?" This is it, this is the connection between the victims, of course it is. Why hadn't anyone seen it? Why hadn't anyone asked?

Then again, no one but him seems to have seen that he's lost his mind either. Leanne... he didn't, he couldn't think about that yet. Whatever was going on there, whatever was happening to him-- a figure from his psychotic break wasn't the unsub, a person was.

She shakes her head. "No. That's-- they're all dead. They're... all of them," She sighs and stares down at the counter. "Wait. No, there was one other guy. His name was Tom. Tom Laako. Good tipper, but not much of a poet, you know?"

"Tom was on the team?" Reid asks, but he already knows the answer before she gives it.

"No," she says. "He wanted to be, but the guys didn't feel like their style meshed. He wasn't really good enough, you know?"

Reid sighs and presses his fingers against his mouth. "Slam poetry," he mutters under his breath. "Wow, that's a new one."

JJ slips in next to him, closer than she's been all day. She still doesn't touch. "Can you tell us anything about where to find Tom Laako, Carol?" she asks. Gentle. Kind.

Reid doesn't wish that she'd touch. He doesn't, he doesn't.

"He's nice," Carol whispers. "Lousy poet, but he's a nice boy. He always--" she stops.

"He always what?" JJ asks. Even her voice is warm, searching.

Carol shakes her head. Her earrings jangle. "Lately, just over the past few weeks, he's been strange. Even before, maybe. He always talks like Leanne is-- I mean, like there really is a woman named Leanne." She flushes and looks away. "Actually--" she stops.

"Yes?" JJ prompts, smooth and gentle, so easy to watch that even Reid has the sudden urge to spill out everything to her. "It's okay to tell us, Carol."

"Last week he told me that I really ought to hang a cold iron horseshoe over the bar, like he thought..." She shakes her head and gives another awkward, miserable laugh. "Like he thought we needed to keep out faeries, you know? I mean, I didn't do it, that would be ridiculous."

"Yeah," Reid mutters. "Totally ridiculous."

He knows JJ watches him too closely the whole way back to the car. He can feel her eyes. Nervous, scared. He wishes he had something for her, something in him to reassure her. He wishes he had anything at all.

\

There are some days that Reid wonders if turning narcoleptic isn't a sign of PTSD. Or incipient schizophrenia. Of course he knows he doesn't need to go searching too far for an explanation, it's just that he never sleeps, just that he's always tired.

He nods off in the car while JJ is on the phone, trying to get a fix on one Tom Laako. He's not even sure who she's talking to, he drifts off too soon.

Maybe it's not so bad dreaming in your sleep. Better than dreaming awake.

She's there, of course she is.

"What do you do?" Leanne asks. She's sitting on a bare stone, her toes dipping into the green water. "Tell me what made you dream of me?"

Reid shakes his head. "I don't know what you mean. I didn't do anything, I just went to sleep and here you are." Better than dreaming awake, he reminds himself. You can't be crazy just because of what happens in your dreams. No one puts you in psychiatric restraints for dreaming. This perfectly normal dream of a girl and cold, cold green water.

She lifts up her chin and looks him in the eye. "No, you did something. You are something. What do you do? Do you paint? Write? Dance? Are you an actor?"

Reid snorts. "If all you needed to be was color blind and clumsy, sure. I could do those things."

She frowns, twisting her face with it. "You must do something," she says.

"I catch killers," Reid answers with a narrow shrug. "I'm a profiler with the FBI. Not exactly artistic."

"Huh," she mutters and sucks in her lower lip. For a second, just a second, she looks like a baffled little girl. "A hunter." Then she smiles at him, bright and open, heartstopping as the sun after weeks of storms. "Well, why not? You'll hunt down the boy who killed my servants."

"Tom," Reid says, slow, questioning. "He killed them because of you, didn't he?"

"I never asked him to," she says and shrugs. Her smile is still bright, wide. "He was sour as moldy water. He didn't even taste good."

She leans in closer, close enough to see the gleam of her teeth. Seeing them is almost like the feeling them bite into his skin, needle sharp. Needle deep and in his blood. "Now you," she breathes. "You taste delicious, like bee honey on a bear's paw. Dream of me some more."   
\

The local cops pick up Tom on the stoop outside his basement apartment. They say he doesn't put up a struggle, just holds out his hands and lets them bring him in.

He looks small in the interrogation room. Small and pale. At first he doesn't look at Reid at all, just flexes and unflexes his fists, over and over again.

"Tell me about Leanne," Reid says. That gets his attention, makes him jump. This is like anyone else that has delusions, Reid tells himself. Play along. No one will think it's weird if you play along. "You killed them because of her, didn't you?"

"I-- she-- Leanne. That's what she said her name was, Leanne," Tom whispers. "So pretty. She likes her boys pretty. Like the fairy queen. She'd like you, she could make you bleed poetry, but when she was done you wouldn't be so pretty anymore, outside or in."

Bleed poetry. Reid manages not to snort. _She'd like you._ In his dreams... in his dreams she had. Not that it mattered. "Is that what you wanted? Poetry?"

"What's the point of being a creative writing major if you can't even write? But you see her, don't you?" Tom mutters into his hands. "I can tell that you do. I can tell she likes you. I can smell the flowers."

Reid tilts his head, careful, listening. "Sure," he says, and he knows everyone outside this room knows he's lying. They just don't know it's them he's lying to. "Of course I can see Leanne. Do other people not see her?"

Tom rolls his eyes. "You know they don't. No one did, except for me and the guys on the team. She loved them more, you know. She always wanted them more."

"Did Leanne tell you to kill them?" Reid asks. She'd sounded angry about what Tom had done at the bar, but-- trap, trap. He couldn't start to act like she was real. He couldn't go that way, not yet. Not ever.

"No," Tom says, firm, sure of that. "She said-- but they didn't need her, you know? They could all write. They were all already good. They didn't need her, I'm the one that did."

"You needed her," Reid pushes. "You needed her and so you..." he lets the words linger.

Tom's crying, silver tears. Tears like her eyes. "She said I wasn't good enough. She said I was too easy to use up. I wanted to show her I loved her, that's all."

"I understand," Reid says, as though he does.

"I love her. She wanted my soul because I wasn't good enough. I think she ate it," he says, as Reid is standing up. "Do you think that's why it was so easy to kill them? Because she ate my soul?"

Reid doesn't, can't answer. He just shakes his head, yes or no.

"She'll eat your too, you know. In the end," Tom calls at Reid's retreating back. "That's what she does, she can't even help it." Reid doesn't run, because he makes himself stay still.

Outside of the interrogation room, JJ and Gideon are waiting by the door. Morgan's leaning against the wall, shaking his head. "All that for an imaginary woman. It's a hard world, man."

JJ follows him down the hall. He doesn't know what she wants until she lifts her hand and puts it on his shoulder. It's nothing, a touch. Casual. It's everything he can do not to lean into it. "Spence," she whispers. "You know I'm here for you, right?"

He forces a smile. It's not that hard when there's a warm, human hand curled on his sweater. "I know," he says. "It's cool, though. Everything is fine."

She sighs and lets him go. He doesn't beg her not to.

\

It's cold in his apartment, but he's not surprised it smells like spring and flowers when he steps inside. Leanne's sitting on his kitchen counter. She's bare, just white skin and pale hair. The weird part of Reid's brain wonders about the odds of having the first naked woman in this apartment be a hallucination. It doesn't seem fair somehow.

None of this is fair.

"The way I see it, there are three possibilities," Leanne says and smiles and crosses her pale, bare ankles. She raises one finger. "One, you bid me stay. I've never been a muse to a profiler before, but I've lain with hunters. I can give you insight. You're already good, with me next to you we'll be invincible. We may never lose another unsub."

Reid snorts and scrubs a hand over his face. "I saw what happened to Tom. I've read my Yeats. You'll drain me dry and I'll either commit suicide or just be an insane wreck. He says you ate his soul."

"So what?" Leanne shrugs. "You're better than him, you'll last longer. And until then you'll be the best. Meteoric. Many have found it a fair price."

"What if I don't?" he asks. He stares down at his fingers while he lets them drop into his lap. "What if I'd rather not lose my mind."

Leanne laughs and shakes her head. "What if you already have? Schizophrenia's a tricky thing. I could be your imaginary friend, Spencer Reid. Just like I was Tom's."

Reid's hands clench up without him knowing how. He keeps looking at them, but there's nothing he can do. It doesn't matter what's real. There's nothing to _do_. "I do know," he whispers, "But if it's that... if it's that, it's already too late."

Leanne raises a second finger. "True!" she says brightly. "And that's option two. You're already broken and I'm just the manifestation. In that case there's no point discussing things, is there? We may as well find you a nice clinic to reside in. With a comfy chair next to your mother, would you like--"

"Shut up," Reid spits out. His hands twitch forward, like they're itching to close around her throat. "Just shut your mouth."

Leanne's gaze follows his motion and she shrugs. "Let's discount that possibility for now, then," she says, smooth and easy. "Option three. I'm real and you try to bid me go."

Reid closes his eyes and tips his head back. He can smell her. Flowers and moonlight in the winter. "Could I?" he whispers. His head aches from the smell, drunk and dizzy. It's like pushing through gauze and pain. "Would you?"

Leanne laughs, piercing the ache around him. "No," she whispers to him, smooth and soft and in his ear. He wonders if this was how his mother felt, fly on a board and the delusions closing in hard. Snapping at his heels, like the dogs of war.

He won't open his eyes. He won't.

"If you rejected me, Spencer? I would hunt you down and rip everything you've ever loved to shreds, body and soul. And feed the remnants to hell. I'm not leaving, not for anything."

Reid covers his face with his hands and laughs into them, louder than her, drowning her out. He doesn't feel anything at all until her ice cold hands peels his back. She kisses him then, on the lips. If he opens his eyes, he could drown in her perfume.

If he opens his eyes, he might see her. He might not. He doesn't know which is worse.


	2. Hold Me Fast and Fear Me Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> JJ's struggling between helping Reid and saving herself. They may turn out to be the same thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quoted text is from one of the Child Ballad versions of Tam Lin.
> 
> This is the optional JJ companion piece to [La Belle Dame Sans Merci](http://vaingirlfic.livejournal.com/57422.html). Reading La Belle Dame is necessary before reading this story, but reading this story is probably not necessary to getting the maximum enjoyment from La Belle Dame if you enjoy ambiguity. On the other hand, if you like horror/sfnal elements, this is your story.

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |  [criminal minds](http://vaingirlfic.livejournal.com/tag/criminal+minds)  
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When she was in school JJ wanted to find the perfect balance. Her mom laughed at her and called her an angel on a knife's edge. She played soccer, captained her team to a victory her senior year. It was the perfect rush, annihilation on the field and an in with the cool kids. She went to prom on the arm of a football player and finished second in her class.

Her boyfriend laughed and bent his head down to kiss her on the brow. "You're the golden one, JJ," he whispered. She laughed back and never, ever let him see her twitch.

She gave the valedictorian speech at graduation because Matt Preston, the real valedictorian, was a skinny, wide-eyed boy with nervous hands and an agonizing stutter. "Y-you s-should do it, JJ," he whispered to her. "They'd laugh at me."

She said all the right things, about how he was wrong, how the honor was supposed to be his and how no one would laugh and who cared about that anyway. Right? But then she gave the speech. The entire student body cheered, even Matt, standing at his feet in the front row, beaming at her.

When she left for college she stopped answering her boyfriend's calls, deleted emails unread and purged his voice mails without listening to them. In the end, he let her make him go. She kept writing to Matt Preston, though, even proofread an early version of his doctoral thesis on Renaissance England and ritual magic.

"They really believed in that stuff, didn't they?" she asked him on the phone one balmy Saturday morning. "That they could use this... whatever it is, to change the world."

"Yeah," Matt said. She wasn't sure when he stopped stuttering, but it had been years since she heard him do it. She could still hear him hesitate on the phone. "Sometimes I think they might have had a point."

"Seriously?" she asked. She was smiling, eye brows raised in a polite disbelief that Matt wouldn't see on the phone and probably wouldn't care about if they were face to face.

"Seriously. There are weird things out there, JJ." He sounded like he was smiling too, excited by what he was saying.

She didn't argue the point, didn't care to. But it was something she filed away in the back of her mind, for whenever it might come in handy.

\

After what happened to Reid, after Hankel, after JJ finally and horribly lost her balance and fucked everything up, she did her best to keep an eye on Reid no matter how little good it had done before.

It felt lame, like a guarding the hen house once the fox had already gotten in level of lame. Maybe even guarding the outside of the damn hen house while the fox was still inside helping himself level of lame. She didn't know. The lame approached astronomical proportions. If Reid weren't the object, she could have gone to him to crunch the necessary statistical analysis to track it.

The sick part was that Reid never acted like he expected her to help him through it, or anything else. He never even looked at her funny, never acted like it should have been her that was tortured and almost destroyed in a small, dark cabin. If there was any guilt being spread around it all rested strictly in the mind of one Jennifer Jareau, FBI.

Sometimes she wanted so badly to just touch him-- it felt like she hadn't, not since they'd first got him back and he was the one that grabbed on to her. She still remembered the feel of him, tensile thin and hard with adrenaline, but yielding to her touch, melting against her. The smell of fear-- covering him up in layers of dried sweat, salt tears and blood.

She must have touched him before then, must have done it all the time-- reach out to ruffle his hair, clap her hand on his shoulder, pull him in. She knew she had, but all those earlier, easier times felt like they'd been wiped out and vanished. When she imagined her hands on Spencer now, it was always like that night, his too thin body shaking with fear and adrenaline and melting against her like she was going to make it better. The smell of his skin, like all he needed in the world was for someone to clean him off, feed him and tuck him into bed. Like he needed it to be her.

She doesn't know if she keeps thinking of him like that because there's something wrong with her or because the longer she watches him the less it seems like he's getting better. He doesn't try to reach for her anymore either.

JJ knows that's she supposed to-- to do something, not stand back and watch like a paralyzed little _coward_. It's the decent, friendly, human thing to do. Even if Reid weren't... whatever he is to her, it would be the decent thing to do. She keeps watching anyway, hanging back, telling herself she's waiting for an opening, that she's just biding her time, that she's not failing.

Then there's the morning she catches him on her way into work and he turns and tips his head and smiles so bright. Like that time she said 'yes, I'll come see the Redskins with you'. Better, because he just looks happy without the nervous ticks... okay.

"We got a case?" he asks her, and his body language is right for the first time in a while, leaning in like he's actually interested. Like he cares. JJ's about ten seconds from grabbing his hand just to see if he feels normal too, but she doesn't.

"Oh yeah," JJ says. "The Boston and Cambridge police have never seen anything like it. Wait until you see it." It'll be good for him, she decides then and there. A case that's weird and tricky, that has nothing personal in it to trip him up.

She might be helping him, it's a hope anyway. She can't stop smiling until they're on the jet to Boston, and she's stuck in an enclosed space, listening while Reid dreams. She doesn't know what he's dreaming about, but she doesn't have to.

He's like a kid, shifting helplessly in his sleep. Whimpering like he's waiting for someone to hear him, huddling down like he doesn't expect anyone to.

She should get up, she should go to him, she knows she should. She looks right at Gideon and isn't surprised to find him staring back at her. She gestures helplessly, stupidly, at Reid, "Could you please just--" she mumbles.

Gideon holds her gaze for a beat and then shrugs and nods. When Gideon stands over him to wake him up, Reid makes a sound, low and deep in his throat, like someone is hurting him before his eyes flutter open.

JJ bites into the soft part of her lower lip hard enough to taste blood and salt and digs crescent-shaped fingernail marks into her open palms. Reid doesn't look at her, but Gideon does.

"It'll get better," Gideon says, and JJ doesn't know who he's talking to, not really, "The dreams will ease off, even if it doesn't feel like that yet."

Reid's voice is quiet, hoarse. Just syllables, strung together like it's a reflex. "Prognosis for post-traumatic stress is variable," he says. "In many cases the subject recovers within six months. Only 30% of individuals will be effected over the long term or permanently."

JJ squeezes her eyes shut and pulls out her ipod before anyone can say anything to her. There's no way for anyone to know that she doesn't actually turn it on, that she's still listening.

On the way off the plane, Gideon catches her by the shoulder, pulling her back. The gesture is studied, like he analyzed her for hours before deciding just how to touch. "JJ," he says, calling her name like he's calling her out. "I probably don't have to tell you that you might have a better chance of catching Reid's attention than the rest of us. If you feel like you can do that, it could help him. It could help you."

"It could?" she doesn't mean to snap, but the words come out sharp and angry. "What are the odds of that? Have you figured them out to the tenth decimal place?"

Gideon doesn't blink. "I'll leave that to Reid," he says, in an almost gentle tone. "But the odds aren't what's stopping you. If it helps you, I can tell you I wouldn't suggest it if I thought you were going to make things worse. You shouldn't be afraid of that."

"You don't know what I'm afraid of," she mutters and tears her gaze away. She hurries down the steps, sliding into Reid's earshot. That'll shut Gideon up faster than anything.

What _are_ you so afraid of? Her brain chatters at her like a bad radio signal, all squeal and static. It hurts to think too much. Like she's still on the knife's edge of getting it all wrong.

JJ puts her all into the case instead, like that will make anything better, make Reid better by transference. Their liaison officer is a very young woman in a uniform that's just a little too big for her. She introduces herself as Mary-Clare Sullivan and squeezes JJ's hand a little too hard in greeting.

She's all sharp, vivid motion when she talks about the case. JJ doesn't have to ask to know Officer Sullivan doesn't have very many homicides under her belt. "It's not human," she says, loud, strident, like being a cop hasn't taught her what humans really are yet. "I mean, what's the point of doing something like this? A monster did this."

JJ smiles despite of herself. Reid's in the corner, staring at crime scene photos but he looks up and catches her eye for a moment and JJ smiles wider. "Believe me, there are enough human monsters out there. I think it would be easier if it were something else," she says. For a second she thinks about her old friend Matt Preston and his theories about belief and monsters and what's real. He might be in Cambridge now. He'd mentioned something about a symposium.

She fights off the sudden urge to call him and find out, sliding over to see what Reid is looking at instead. They talk victimology, Reid bouncing ideas off of JJ like she's a real profiler, like they never fucked up together going after an unsub and he was never the only one who paid for it.

Mary-Clare gives them the break they need in the form of a name and place to go, when JJ asks, "Have you found any connection between the victims?"

"Not much to go on. They were all at different schools, mostly ran with different sets of friends." Mary-Clare sounds bored, like she's reciting, like she doesn't know what she's saying even matters that much. "The only thing we found out is that they all spent Tuesday nights at a bar in Central Square called the Cantab. Poetry nights."

Reid looks at her like he can't believe that kind of stupidity exists in human form and it takes all of JJ's diplomacy to keep from intervening between him and their liaison. Then he looks at JJ and his face is just tired, bruised, when he says, "I want to go and take a look." JJ doesn't even have to think about it.

She smiles at him and he smiles back, like they're in this together. Hunting. "I'll come with you," she says and the look Reid gives her, a flicker of surprise and something wide open and wondering underneath makes her so glad, so glad she said that.

She falls into step next to Reid easily, her skin tingling with the pleasant awareness of his closeness. Whenever he turns back to look at her his eyes are bright, alive.

When they get to the Cantab, she pulls aside the owner to see what she can find out while Reid paces the half empty front room, inspecting the corners like the building can tell him stories. With Reid, maybe it can. JJ wouldn't be surprised.

She doesn't think anything of it until she comes out from talking to Carol and Reid's at the bar, talking to someone with tight, animated gestures. Talking to someone, except there's no one there but Reid and she knows he hasn't invested in a blue tooth phone lately.

He doesn't seem to notice there's anything wrong at first. Just looks right at Carol and asks about her bartender. Carol blinks, like she's got no idea what he's talking about. "Leanne," Reid pushes. His face is tight, stubborn.

Carol bites her lip. "Someone told you Leanne was a bartender?" she asks and shakes her head.

Reid goes tenser, more huddled into himself. "She's not?"

Carol looks away. The skin around her brown eyes is tight, tight as her jaw. "I can't believe anyone said that to you. To a Fed! Jesus. She's not-- look, there is no Leanne working here. That's just what they used to call their slam poetry team, it's a play on Lan-awn."

Reid's twitching hands go still. "Lan-awn, you mean Lennan. Lennan sidhe. A fairy muse. Commonly believed to be vampiric in nature, as written about by Yeats." JJ has never been interested in Yeats, but she's sure she'll learn, that Reid will tell her. Reid keeps talking, like he's piecing it together while he speaks. "By 'they', you mean--"

"I mean the guys who-- the ones who were murdered," Carol looks away. Looks right at JJ. There's something new on her face, a flicker of something JJ doesn't understand, can only wait and watch to see if it will start to make sense. "It was kind of a new thing, the team. They wrote together. Entered some competitions. They called themselves the Disciples of Leanne, it was... they thought they were being clever, I guess. I didn't even-- fuck, I should have told the cops this before, shouldn't I have?"

When Reid looks at her, JJ tries to reflect calm back. He's nervous, still has misfiring neurons from what happened to him, everything that happened to him. Strong visual hallucinations aren't necessarily out of the question for a case of PTSD and it's no good freaking him out. It's no good freaking them both out.

Carol catches her before she can say much, pulls her aside, out of Reid's earshot. JJ almost doesn't go with her, but her hands are surprisingly strong when she tugs.

"What are you so afraid of, Janet?" Carol asks. Her eyes look different in the dim light, greener.

JJ blinks, because she knows she told Carol her name already. Still... it's been crazy, stressful. She forces a smile. "I'm sorry," she says. "I thought I'd said, but my name isn't Janet. It's Jennifer. Jennifer Jareau."

Carol tilts her head and almost smiles back, JJ can see it in her face. "Is it, then?" she says, and brushes her hand through the air between them, dismissing the idea. "If you say so. You still shouldn't be afraid."

"To do what?" JJ snaps. It's not the first time a witness has tried to touch her and usually she doesn't mind. It's her job to smile and be the human one in public. This is something else.

"To take what's yours. You can, you know." Carol nods her head and pulls something out of her pocket, presses it into JJ's hand before JJ has a chance to respond. "You can have that boy, the Lenann couldn't stand if you weren't afraid to fall."

"I honestly don't know what you're talking about," JJ says, feeling the weight of the object, irregularly shaped and something surprisingly heavy on her palm. She stares down at it. It's a horseshoe, black iron, wrapped in thick cloth. It's horseshoe shaped, anyway, the tips are filed down to a wicked looking point, sharp enough to break skin on contact, JJ would bet anything. She whistles.

When she looks up, Carol's standing to usher her out of the bar, like she hasn't done anything weird at all.

JJ stares at her and a dozen quick thoughts fire through her head. Something's wrong, something smells worse than wrong. She should do something, call out for Reid, call up Gideon, get Carol to a police interrogation room and drill this down, figure it out. She should be doing it now, but her thoughts feel heavy, too bright.

She manages to open her mouth, holds out a hand, the one without the weight of iron in it, and Carol smiles at her. "Hush, Janet. Hush... Gwenyf... Jennifer, not yet," she says, and JJ loses the thread of her fear. She blinks and everything stutters to a halt.

Carol's eyes are brown. JJ can't remember why she thought they were green before. Something, she was thinking something about Carol, but now she can't remember what to save her life. If it was important, she's sure it'll come to her. Right now she has Reid to worry about.

Reid's eyes are brown. Reid shouldn't really be alone right now. JJ gives Carol her best wide, professional smile. A smile from a girl voted most likely to be on television in her high school class. "We really appreciate your help. Don't worry, we're going to catch this guy,"she says.

"I know you will," Carol says. Her eyes crinkle up, crow's feet visible. "With you on our side, we have nothing to be afraid of."

JJ smiles, shakes her hand, and goes to find Reid. She barely even thinks about the weight of the cloth wrapped horse shoe in her hand, just spares enough thought to slide it into her purse before she climbs into the car.

She doesn't let herself think about how scared Reid looked in that dark bar, how she doesn't want to know what Reid looks like scared anymore. She doesn't let herself think at all about anything but tracking down their unsub, not until they're in the car coming back and he falls asleep in the seat beside her. He's curled up like he's trying to make himself small, skinny arms clenched tight around his stomach.

He makes sounds in his sleep, little whimpering squeaks. JJ's exhausted by his fear and shamed by his courage. She doesn't try to touch him, to wake him. She's no Gideon, nothing she could say would be the right thing.

Nothing she can say will ever make it better.

 

\

The killer, when they have him locked up, is almost a let down. He shouldn't be, JJ's seen hundreds of examples of banal evil in her files, dozens face to face. What's one more guy killing over delusions and poetry? He's nothing special.

The only thing interesting that happens after they close the case is a late night call from Matt Preston. He sounds tightly wound on the phone, nervous.

"I saw you on the news," he says. JJ can hear something tapping in the background, or maybe it's just phone static. "Looks like you guys caught your man."

"We did," JJ says. She doesn't smile. "It's... it's work, you know? What's up, Matt?"

"Nothing," Matt says. "Look, just-- you're careful, right? You're being careful."

"I'm an FBI agent, Matt," JJ says. She can hear the confused pitch in her tone and tries to smooth it out before she talks again. "What's wrong?"

There's a pause on the line. Heavy breathing. The tapping sounds gets louder, like it's coming closer. Matt sighs. "Nothing, I just-- You do dangerous things, Jayge. In a lot of ways, not just the obvious. Sometimes I see you on the news and I think about you. Whether you're safe."

"I am safe," JJ says, steadying herself. Without thinking about it, her hand slides into her purse. Her fingers graze over cold iron and tighten. "I am safe," she repeats, suddenly more sure of it.

She can hear the snort of Matt's laugh over the phone. "If anyone would be, it would be you. You're the most human person I know. Just keep being careful."

He hangs up before she gets a chance to ask if he's in town, if they can get dinner or something. It's just as well, JJ's not really in the mood for dinner.

\

On the flight home after Boston, Reid's eyes get hazier. There are other tells, like the twitches that could be hyper vigilance and could be something else. The way he wears his sleeves long, pulled down over his wrists in all weather. But it's the vagueness that bothers JJ, like he's lost in someone else's nightmare.

Reid has never been vague, hazy-edged. He's never been this before.

She doesn't know how to reach for him. She doesn't know how. She hears whispers in her head that sound like her own voice telling her to suck it up, not to be so scared. To get over this.

JJ doesn't feel scared, watching him. She feels as piss terrified as if she was back somewhen else-- trapped in a dark barn with man-eating dogs that were all going to go for her at once, with just her arm and a glock to her name. She lets Reid go, doesn't call after him when he gives her a wave and a hollowed out smile.

The circles under his eyes are so dark, so heavy, like they're going to outweigh the rest of him any day now.

JJ goes home to her own dark, empty apartment, puts away her gun and starts to pace. There's a full moon that night and she doesn't bother to turn on any of her lights. She just watches it, watches it and wonders what she's supposed to do. Why it feels like she's supposed to do something.

"Reid," she mumbles. "Damnit, Spence." She closes her eyes.

Opens them again when there's a buzzing sound from her blackberry where she'd abandoned it on the kitchen counter. She almost ignores it, but it could be work. Could be Reid.

It's an email instead, from Matt. Nothing in it, just some quoted poetry. JJ reads over the words on the screen and frowns, shaking her head.

_Janet has kilted her green kirtle  
A little aboon her knee,  
And she has broded her yellow hair  
A little aboon her bree,  
And she's awa to Carterhaugh  
As fast as she can hie. _

"Janet," she mumbles. "My name's not--" she stops. She stops short. This isn't real.

She hears Carol's voice in her head. Something she's forgotten. _You shouldn't be afraid to take what's yours. You can have that boy, the Lenann couldn't stand if you weren't afraid to fall. _

How did she forget that? How could she? None of this is real, JJ tells herself. She needs to call up Matt and ask him what the spam forwarding is all about. She needs to go to bed, get some sleep, before she ends up as crazy as...

As Reid.

JJ's on her feet, barely taking the time to grab her purse and her gun holster. She doesn't remember getting the car out of the driveway, doesn't remember circling Reid's place to find parking. She must have done those things, because the next thing she can remember she's at Reid's front door with her gun in one hand and the horseshoe shaped stake in the other.

This is crazy, but JJ's already stepped off the normal train and all she can hear is her pulse pounding in her ears. Adrenaline red. She doesn't know what she's going to find on the other side of this door, but every over-trained cop instinct tells her it's something bad.

Reid keeps a spare key hidden in a little lock box by the door post. The combination's a Fibonacci sequence, or at least it was last time JJ had asked. She holds her breath and tries out now, only exhaling when it clicks open and the small, silver colored key falls into her fingers.

She doesn't want to let go of her weapons to open the door, but she ends up holstering the gun and clutching the stake even though no one ever taught her how to use anything like this as anything but a blunt instrument.

The door clicks open easily and JJ steps inside, fighting down the urge to clear the room like she has a team of back-up coming right in. She goes in quiet instead, easy on the carpeted floor. The air smells too sweet, like dry and rotting flowers and it's all she can do not to gag and choke, but she's smelled worse rots than this.

There's a sound coming from the bedroom. It's a wet sounds, whimpers, groans. Like someone having a nightmare. Or someone having sex. For a second JJ's rational brain takes over, screams at her. This is crazy, she's acting insane. Reid has... Reid has a girlfriend over or something. She needs to get out of here. She needs to...

Reid makes that noise again. If it's someone having sex, he sure as hell isn't liking it. He sounds... he sounds like he did on a grainy video feed when someone was killing him. When Tobias Hankel was killing him and making the rest of them watch. Then the sound is almost drowned out by a laugh, female, bright. Like ringing bells.

JJ tastes the iron in her own blood when she bites down on her lower lip. She moves. It's training driving her, even clutching an unfamiliar weapon, ready to... she doesn't know.

She doesn't know what she's going to do until she does. _Don't be afraid, Janet. You won't lose_, a voice that's not hers whispers to her. She's not, though, she's really not.

Reid's sprawled out naked in his own bed, pale in the moonlight, but JJ barely spares him a glance. There's something riding him. For a second it looks like a weapon, silver pale in the moonlight. For a second it looks like a snake, dripping poison, constricting him alive. For a second it looks like fire, nothing that was ever life.

JJ isn't scared at all when she puts the sharp, fierce part of the iron through the place where the kidneys would be if this were a human woman. She sees silver, it fills her vision. Smells that rotten floral stink until she gags. She hears Spence making those sounds, awful, choking gasps and low whimpers. Then there's nothing, there's nothing.

The two of them are kneeling in a bed with silver dust raining down around them, covering JJ's clothes and Reid's bare skin. Alone.

Reid stares up. His eyes are dark, dilated enough she wants to check for concussion, but he moves without trouble. There's nothing between them, so she drops the stake down beside him and gives him a once over. His skin under her hands feels cold, clammy. Shock.

It warms, though. Under her touch, he warms like his body remembers it's alive. He blinks. "JJ?" he whispers, little boy high pitched. "I-- you saw? It was real?"

She doesn't know what she saw. She doesn't know what she _did_. "Yeah," she whispers. "It's okay now." She presses her lips down onto his forehead. He smells of sweat and fear, like he did after Hankel. His legs are spread out akimbo underneath her and there's a mess of half dried fluid on his stomach she tries not to think about.

"I thought I was having a psychotic break," he mumbles. JJ nods, and doesn't say that she thought... that she doesn't know what she thought, or thinks.

"Shhh..." she croons and wraps her arms around him, pulling them both down into his bed. He feels sharp and light in her arms, like a reverse version of the pieta. She curls around him closer.

His mouth twists against her cheek. "If this was real," he says, and even the way he is now, shaking and slick and dirty from... whatever, he's ahead of her. "If this is real, that means-- I don't know what it means. The implications are... I don't know."

JJ nods and tries not to tense. "I've got you now," she whispers. "In the morning we can... can think about what next."

"Yeah?" he says. His eyes are still so dark in the moonlight. She kisses him again, on the eyelids this time, and then on the mouth. It's meant to be a sisterly kiss, comfortable and comforting. After whatever happened here, it's not meant to be hungry.

He opens his mouth first, makes it fierce, wild. She tastes him on her tongue and kisses back just as hard. It might not last until morning, but right now, with her arms full of a desperate boy, JJ is as perfectly balanced as an angel dancing on a knife's edge. There's no way she can even imagine falling.


End file.
